How to access a browser cookie in a react app

Question

This question is a bit popular but Im not having such luck. Im mostly a backend person so Im learning as I go along.

I have a cookie named connect.sid and value of 12345. I see this in my chrome dev tools.

In my react app I console logged document.cookie and localStorage.getItem('connect.sid'). Im getting null values. How to get the value of 12345?

Passportjs, using passport-github2 strategy, created this cookie. I need access to it so I could talk to my API.

Thanks

Answer 1

Using react-cookie may be the easiest way to get cookie value. You can run npm install react-cookie, the v2 will be installed. If you only want to use a simple API only on the client, i will suggest to use v1. Just run npm install [email protected], add import cookie from 'react-cookie' to you file and use cookie.load('connect.sid') to get cookie value. You can check the README of v1 for detail.

If you still cannot get the cookie value, please confirm:

1. the cookie is set to correct path like /, if you want your cookie to be accessible on all pages.
2. the cookie is not httpOnly cookie, HttpOnly cookies aren't accessible via JavaScript.

Answer 2

I know that answer is not exactly what you want, but if you just want to authorize someone on the serverside i have an easy solution. Just add

credentials: 'same-origin'

to your AJAX request. If you have done that the cookie will get send with your connect.sid to the server and the server will handle the authentification for you.